Dear Michel,

Illegal immigration has become, as you know, the obsession of the Northern countries, barricaded as they are against what they see as an invasion of hordes attempting to take advantage of their wealth. Almost every day, the media recount the deaths at sea of those attempting to sail from Africa to Europe, from Turkey to Italy, not to mention those that have suffocated in trucks crossing the Channel tunnel between France and England. Sangatte has become more than just a place near Calais, it alone symbolises this porous border which cannot stop the uninterrupted flow of migrants pursued by poverty.

But your play, Skinner, is not just a symbol of this "fact of society" that television loves so much. He is a man whose tragedy you transcribe in a play which bears his name. He happens to be someone washed up in a port, who wants to go to the other side. Obviously, he is not alone in his situation: thousands of miserable wretches like him have been waiting days, months, some even longer, to be able to cross. But borders are not crossed just like that, at least if you are poor and without documents. In short, to cross, an illegal migrant needs a Smuggler, or more precisely an Organisation in which smugglers are recruited, trained and ready to obey all the orders decreed by their Big Boss Smuggler, in order to always respond better to the needs of their illegal emigrant clients … Of course ! At least this is what a certain Rachid wants to convince him of, at the beginning of your play, after Skinner called out to him, one rainy day, along the warehouses of a port, in the name of the tough battles they fought against each other at Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Pristina and the rest.

Now, here they are, both of them in the same mess. Skinner has got caught in his own trap. He has become dependent on lame Rachid and ends up being with him, in the place he has been allotted in advance: the Big Warehouse, the Citadel-Hostel-Asylum-Prison-Hell of those Waiting-for-the-Great-Departure-for-the-Other-Side. Terror City, Slum-Town, the back-side, the invisible fringe of all today's cities, in the heart of which the borders are marked out, and "here" and "there" are delimited. Transit camps, emergency hostels, entirely managed by the illegal Organisation and entirely reproducing - even better! - the functioning of legal society. The law of maximum profit, everyone at war with everyone else, the balance of power, constantly swinging, constantly being recomposed: alliance, counter-alliance, betrayals, compromise, truce, etc. … we wonder why Skinner has so much trouble crossing to the other side, he who is already totally integrated with the reigning law of liberalism which produces all the wonders he dreams of acquiring. Could it be that the Organisation, as in Kafka, only maintains itself by functioning in an incomprehensible, purely arbitrary way?
Suddenly, something occurs which breaks this habituation, it, too, is incomprehensible. Skinner falls in love with Leïla. She, too, is a prisoner in the warehouse. But, she is even more deeply in misfortune than Skinner, even more desperate. Therefore harder...

Skinner should have known. For the candidates for the Great Departure to the Promised Land of merchandise, it's every man for himself, no solidarity, no sympathy. Nothing. But there you are, love doesn't know this. It strikes ! Skinner is on the way down. He, the tough one, who refuses Mani's illusions about the illegal travellers possibly combining their forces against the masters of the Organisation, lets himself be taken by the mirage of an image of a woman. He knows he's heading for disaster and that in the end, death awaits him. But he goes on, inexorably. A tragic character, Skinner fulfils his destiny. There's no way out for him, and this is how he attains his humanness. Love is precisely what will bring his earthly life to an end. He has to pass through the death of his biological body in order to extricate himself from the situation he had been placed in and the status he had been allotted: pile of meat, buyable, sellable, interchangeable. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault at the same time, the event of love makes a breach in the weighty, motionless time of bio-politics...

Jean-Paul Dollé
June 2002

Extracts from a letter to be published in LEXI/textes 6, "Michel Deutsch" chapter,
Théâtre National de la Colline/L'Arche Éditeur, September 2002